Professor Julie Brigham-Grette is one of three recipients of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Awards for 2011-12, which consist of a cash award of $3,000 and a year's leave of absence to encourage award recipients to concentrate on activities related to graduate education, research, creative work and scholarly attainment.

Julie is a Principal Investigator and the U.S. Chief Scientist on the multimillion dollar international Lake El'gygytgyn Scientific Drilling Project in NE Russia. In a recent email, Julie described some of her recent research. "In Spring 2009, we drilled Lake El'gygytgyn in NE Russia and are now working on a large series of papers for 2011 on the results. We were successful in recovering a 3.6 million year long climate record with many fascinating surprises -- including some of the first land based documentation of the warmth of interglacials in the high latitudes suggesting the Greenland ice sheet is more vulnerable than we thought. I have new funding to work on paleo-sea ice proxies in the Bering and Chukchi Seas and am continuing our Svalbard REU program this summer with Ross Powell from Northern Illinois University."

Julie received a B.A. in Geology at Albion College in 1977, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has been a faculty member at UMass Amherst since 1987. To read more about Julie's research see her web site at UMass.

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